After all the partisan rhetoric at Samuel Alito’s confirmation hearings, it was no surprise that the Senate Judiciary Committee’s vote today faithfully followed party lines — all 10 Republicans for, all eight Democrats against. The full Senate vote later this week could shake out similarly, which would be enough to put Alito on the U.S. Supreme Court. It won’t be enough, however, to reassure Americans who still believe that the highest court in the land should be above politics. Lately, the confirmation process has been nothing but politics.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Fog forced President Bush to travel from Topeka to Manhattan via sport-utility vehicle rather than by helicopter, putting the president knee to knee for an hour with Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and Sens. Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts. As Bush got to know the Flint Hills, which he reportedly loved, Sebelius got to bend his ear about matters such as the nightmarish Medicare drug benefit rollout (he reassured her Kansas would get its $1.3 million back) and her concern that his new budget may include reductions in National Guard troop strength (he didn’t reassure her). Especially because Bush seemed surprised to hear about the Medicare woes, this seems like a case of Kansas’ capricious weather doing well by Kansans for once.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The primary point of President Bush’s lengthy, conversational address Monday to a friendly audience at Kansas State University seemed to be that if more Americans understood “there’s still an enemy which lurks out there,” fewer Americans in Congress and otherwise would question his administration’s no-holds-barred prosecution of the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq, including warrantless electronic eavesdropping on Americans.
One regrettable impression left by the speech, part of the Landon Lecture series, was that Bush is having to spend so much time these days justifying his past decisions. Starting with next week’s State of the Union address, he needs to get specific on his vision for the rest of his second term.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Charles Marsh (in photo), a professor of religion at the University of Virginia, had an op-ed piece in The New York Times last week arguing that evangelicals made a “Faustian bargain” with the Bush administration. In exchange for political access and power, the ministers gave their lockstep, uncritical support for the war in Iraq, he charged.
Marsh read their sermons leading up to the war and was surprised by how little attention the ministers paid to Christian moral doctrine. “Some tried to square the American invasion with Christian ‘just war’ theory, but such efforts could never quite reckon with the criterion that force must only be used as a last resort,” he wrote. “As a result, many ministers dismissed the theory as no longer relevant.”
In doing so, Marsh wrote, church leaders have moved away from Christianity’s primary mission “to hunger for righteousness, to pursue peace, to forbear revenge, to love enemies, in other words, to be marked by the cross.” And he argued that they have “undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
City Manager George Kolb is expected to recommend today that the Wichita City Council put off until fall a decision about the future of the Wichita Boathouse — but the need for such a delay isn’t clear. The council earlier delayed a decision on what to do with the Boathouse in large part because of a proposal to build a new arena over the river by the Boathouse. But the Sedgwick County Commission rejected that proposal last week. So why not go ahead and make a decision? And if it does decide, the council should pick one of the Boathouse proposals that preserves the building, rather than Jack DeBoer’s plan to tear it down and build an office building.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Waste Connections’ new landfill in Harper County began accepting trash last week from Sumner and Cowley counties, and it plans to start receiving Wichita’s trash by mid-February, after an access road is completed, The Hutchinson News reported. If those plans proceed — opponents are still trying to get the courts to block the landfill, but they are unlikely to succeed –there likely won’t be enough trash volume left in Sedgwick County to financially justify a local landfill.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Considering the high incidence of HIV/AIDS in the African-American community (African-Americans accounted for 6 percent of the Kansas population but 26 percent of AIDS cases diagnosed between 2000 and 2002), it’s important that pastors at several Wichita churches, including Tabernacle Baptist, Calvary Baptist and North Heights Christian, have agreed to help raise awareness with their congregations about this scourge prior to Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day on Feb 7.
Yes, the strong moral feelings regarding homosexuality make this a touchy topic. But if the pastors can in a nonjudgmental way enhance knowledge about high-risk behaviors, including drug abuse and promiscuity, and promote compassion toward suffering victims, they will have provided a valuable service for their community.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
